After 13 years of caustic feuding that sent Australia’s best-known business families, the Packers and the ­Murdochs, through a carnival of courts, the final chapter of One.Tel’s sorry ­collapse was closed in 14 days of ­backroom talks on the 46th floor of ­Sydney’s MLC Centre.

One.Tel was founded in the dot.com heyday of the mid-1990s – its cartoon surfer dude was a household icon for his sale of mobile services and ­long-distance phone calls.

When One.Tel’s co-founder
Jodee Rich
went on the hunt for funds to take on
Telstra
and
SingTel-Optus
in their own game, he found his Cranbrook schoolmate
James Packer
an eager partner. By 1999,
Lachlan Murdoch
was also in for the ride with both parties stumping up large sums of time, money and their family’s reputation.

But just two years later with the dot.com bubble bursting around the world, One.Tel was spending too much and making too little.

Creditors owed millions of dollars said they firmly believed neither the Packers nor the Murdochs would let their investments slide into oblivion and that kept them supplying services right to the dying days.

In May 2001, a last-ditch effort was made to raise $132 million through a rights issue to be underwritten by the Murdochs and Packers. But an Ernst and Young report showed One.Tel needed up to $320 million to stay solvent so the board put it into administration. Packer and Murdoch abstained.

By mid-2001 all confidence was gone. Creditors moved to wind the company up and a committee of inspection was formed to represent them.

In 2003, the courts appointed
Paul Weston
as the special purpose ­liquidator to investigate and pursue any wrong-doing by the directors over the fateful decision not to raise capital.

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Years of strife followed through which the committee of creditor’s anger and sense of betrayal shifted from the directors toward their own.

Anger mounted over Weston’s spending, which he defended as vital. Allegations of excessive spending, the hiring of private investigators and lengthy delays troubled the process.

Sources close to the process say the much-maligned Weston deserves some credit and his confrontational approach may have successfully ­intimidated others into settling earlier.

“You have to have every style in your armoury because there’s no point ­dealing with a billionaire the way you would with a street fighter," they said. “Stand up and disagree with them but when you do it, be respectful of them."

The committee could not fire ­Weston, so members say the last 20 meetings were a passive-aggressive dance where the committee would not hold proper strategy meetings or discussions unless he was out of the room.

Finally, after nine years and $14 million in expenses, One.Tel creditor SingTel-Optus succeeded in getting him taken off the case.

Enter the boy from Bega –
Stephen Parbery
. Recommended by Optus and accepted by the committee, Parbery was appointed by the court in 2012 and took on a very different approach.

He spent months investigating the issue before taking what many people involved said was his master stroke – hiring ­well-connected Melbourne ­solicitor
Leon Zwier
to act as an ­independent arbitrator.

Zwier was as close to being a trusted party amongst the pursued parties as you can get in corporate circles, having worked for Packer and been friendly with his long-time advisor
Guy Jalland
, who represented the Murdochs and Packers in the negotiations.

The Packers and the Murdochs were publicly keen for the fight, with a fairly strong case and a desire to clear their names through the courts after 13 years of One.Tel hanging as an albatross around their necks.

That’s not to say the Packers or Murdochs would have got off lightly. More than 20 boxes of documents gained through the lengthy process would all have been aired in open court on top of One.Tel’s database – a potential ­Pandora’s Box for everyone involved.

Even if the case was overturned, appeals to the High Court beckoned with the litigation funder being Dutch businessman
Louis Reijtenbagh
.

He was a man rumoured to have pockets deep enough to rival that of the Packers and Murdochs.

Creditors were also told they had a good chance of winning $244 million and expenses – egged along by
Lipman Karas
the lawyers for Reijtenbagh.

But after 13 years of internecine fighting with countless meetings and no result, the committee finally ­succumbed. In the final weeks before the Easter holidays Parbery invited the committee to convene on the 46th floor of the MLC Centre in Sydney’s Martin Place where he laid out the options ­prepared with the help of Zwier and had them agree to negotiations.

Zwier then pushed his ramped up discussions with Jalland to hash out an agreement that suited all parties.

Finally, with rain pelting through Sydney’s business heartland, Zwier and Jalland joined Parbery in his office for the final lock-in negotiation. Hours passed until the afternoon, when they had the $40 million deal the committee and litigation funder would swallow – just two weeks after being given the ­official go-ahead.

And thus it all ended, not with a bang but a two-week whimper. After years of bitter conflict fought on the front pages of Australia’s newspapers, three men shook hands and walked away.